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I am working on a requirement where I need to collate information from a persons social media profile into the application mainly LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Twitter.

The app has the email ID provided by the user. Assumption is of course that the person uses the same email ID across all the services.

My initial gut feel is that I need to ask the my user to login into my app using their Facebook / Google / Twitter ID and once he is authenticated, the corresponding API can then give their information. However, I am not sure if this approach would be feasible for multiple providers i.e. I need info both from Facebook AND Google+ for example

Alternatively, is it possible to use the API's of any of these Social Media applications to map the email ID I have to a user in those applications and then to get the user's public information?

Also, is anyone aware of any 3rd party products / API's which can help provide this kind of identification? I have heard of Rapleap (www.rapleaf.com) but the profile data provided by them does not seem to have social media related information that I am interested in.

Note : I have never worked on anything related to social media in the past and hence if there is some faux pas in what I am trying to do, please feel free to point out the same.

Jagmag
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3 Answers3

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I'll start by assuming that when you say "email ID" you actually mean "email address" which in turn is the user id for those social media networks

is it possible to use the API's of any of these Social Media applications to map the email ID I have to a user in those applications and then to get the user's public information?

Yes and No. In order to request profile information from of these social media networks (let's called them just "providers") your app will need to request it on behalf of the actual user. That is, the user will need to authenticate itself with these providers through your app. For this to happen, the user will need to provide a minimum amount of information (email and password) and your app will need to authenticate as well...usually through OAuth or a native API by specifying an already issued "App ID" (or Client ID) and an App Secret. This is information you should receive by these providers once you have successfully registered your app with them.

is anyone aware of any 3rd party products / API's which can help provide this kind of identification?

I'm not too sure and this is out of the scope of Stackoverflow...but, do you really need to add another abstraction layer in your project? Another dependency? Consider interacting directly with these providers, you have more benefits

So, basically, your app will have to get the user to supply his/her credentials in order to request this information. In the case of OAuth, your app will never see these credentials because the authentication process happens outside your app, all your app will receive is an access token to request the information that is available within the scope of the access token. By that I mean, you have to request specific permissions. There's a lot of information available on the developer's site of these providers and I'm sure you'll get around it without any problems, but feel free to ask if something is not clear enough.

Justin Grant
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Leo
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  • Would you know if it possible for the application user to do multiple oauth authentication (for example both facebook and google) in the same session so that I can get their google+ info as well as their facebook info? (never used oauth before so have no idea about it :-() – Jagmag Mar 19 '14 at 03:48
  • In simple words, no, it's not possible because the user needs to actually login with these providers and give consents of the permissions your app is requesting – Leo Mar 19 '14 at 03:54
  • here's a document that explains it...https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/login-flow-for-web – Leo Mar 19 '14 at 03:55
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There's a way to get user information from sites like facebook,google,linkedin,yahoo etc by using their OAuth service. For this you need to develop your application to include OAUth Service from any of these sites and allow the user to log into any of these services and choose what all data they would be interested to share for using your application. Again, you will have to configure your facebook/etc application to include options for the users to select while logging in.

77-thoughts
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It really depends on the social media account. Some sites allow you to search by email, but this assumes that the email address you have is the same address the person used for the account. Others do not. What I would do is identify the sites which allow you to search by email, and go to those sites and search. That is the most straightforward way.

Viktor Petreski
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